Sanda's Place for Coffee and Voice
A funny, sarcastic, humorous and sometimes not quite, journey inside and out...............only first posts, not any more...........decided to publish the good work of others

Saturday, July 27, 2013

On Strength by Steven Plaut

One of
the stranger customs in synagogues is the bestowing of wishes to be strong upon
those who are called to the Torah.In Ashkenazi synagogues, anyone
receiving such an aliya is greeted with "Yasher (Yiyasher) Koach,"
meaning roughly May your Strength be Kept Up.In Sephardic
synagogues, the more common greeting is "Chazak U'baruch," meaning May
you be Strong and Blessed.But what does strength have to do with
it?I mean, I can see bestowing a wish of strength on the fellows
who are holding the scrolls, since they are quite heavy.But the
ordinary person getting an aliya is not doing any serious lifting or
carrying.So why does he need a wish for
strength?

The
explanation is that in Judaism the highest pursuit for a person is to study so
diligently that he exhausts himself.Therefore, wishing someone
strength is an indirect compliment to that person, congratulating him for
driving himself to exhaustion in his studies and wishing him to continue to do
so, to the point where he is in need of outside wishes that strength be
conferred upon him.

Rabbi
Shlomo Goren is the famous rabbi who blew the shofar on the Temple Mount when it
was liberated by the IDF in the Six Day War and before the pusillanimous
politicians turned out over to the Moslem Waqf for control and
administration.In one of his books, Rabbi Goren describes an
incident involving the great Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook, the founder of the modern
Religious Zionist movement and of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, and
Chief Rabbi of "Palestine" from 1921 onwards.

When
Rabbi Kook was a young man, he went off for a month of rest and rehabilitation
in a health spa in Lithuania.He was sitting under trees one day
studying a volume of Talmud.An older Rabbi passed by him,
snatched his Talmud away from him and screamed at him "Thief!"Why are you calling me that, he asked, from whom did I
steal?

The
older Rabbi explained.I can see from your appearance that you are
a young rabbi.And the fact that you are here must mean that your
community felt you had exhausted yourself in studying Torah to the point that
you are now in need of rest and recovery.Therefore, if you are
spending your time here studying Talmud, you are misusing your community's
resources.You are exhausting yourself and you are betraying your
own community, which sent you here to rest and not to exhaust yourself, and
therefore you are failing your own community and undeserving of the salary you
are receiving from them.

Years
later, in a very different incident involving the same Rabbi Kook, one can see
all of the elements of the corruption and moral decrepitude of the politicized
governmental Rabbinic hierarchy in Israel today, the very same one that just
selected two Ultra-Orthodox Chareidim as chief rabbis over alternative
candidates who were modern-Orthodox, meaning men who live in the 21st century as
opposed to the 16th century.

In the
middle of the 1948-9 Israeli War of Independence, there was some debate among
the Orthodox as to whether yeshiva students should leave their studies and
participate in the war, especially in defense of the Jewish Quarter inside the
old city of Jerusalem.The very same Rabbi Kook was unambiguously
in favor of all yeshiva students halting their studies and participating in the
fighting.Although very old at the time, the Rabbi himself was
seen digging trenches and participating in the war effort.But
according to a recent biography of Shear Yishuv Hacohen, a later Chief Rabbi of
Haifa, a malicious letter was suddenly distributed among all the Orthodox
communities of Jerusalem.It was a letter signed by the very same
Rabbi Kook urging rabbinic students NOT to serve in the military and NOT to
participate in fighting.(Shear Yishuv ignored it, joined the
battle, and was taken prisoner by the Jordanians.) The letter was being
distributed by those Chareidi groups opposed to Jerusalem's yeshiva students
joining in the war effort.

As it
turned out, the letter in question was indeed written by the same Rabbi Kook,
but it was written in World War I and was addressed to yeshiva students studying
in the UK who were refugees from Poland and Lithuania.At the time
Rabbi Kook was of the opinion that they should continue their studies and not
enlist for the fighting in World War I.The same Rabbi held the
diametrically opposite position regarding participation in Israel's own war of
liberation.But his earlier letter was hijacked and distorted and
misused for cynical political purposes by dishonest "Orthodox" functionaries
advancing their own agenda.Somewhat like the
politicized Chareidi functionaries in Israeli politics today, hijacking
and distorting and misrepresenting Judaism.

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About Me

I Am very strong-willed and proud, but intensely private and not easy to know well. Behind my quiet exterior lies a great deal of emotional depth,sensitivity,complexity,and also fierce determination. When I want something I go after it rather quietly but insistently and wholeheartedly - and I usually get it.
I am a freedom-loving, strong-willed, and independent-minded individual, and I insist upon living my own life as I see fit, even if that means ignoring convention and tradition. In personal relationships I cannot be owned or possessed, and while I am willing to share myself with another, I do not always adjust easily to the emotional give and take of a close relationship. Though intellectually open, I can be enormously stubborn, opinionated, and inflexible on a one-to-one level. I have strong convictions and feelings about fairness and equality, and I try to live by my ideals, but my ideals about how people SHOULD treat one another don't always take into account human weaknesses, differences, and needs. I probably dislike sentimentality and traditional gender roles and "games".